Saturday, January 24, 2015

I am by no means a Buhari enthusiast. But I’d choose
him (or, for that matter, anybody) over Goodluck Jonathan, not because I nurse
any personal animus against Jonathan (I actually feel pity for him because the
presidency evidently overwhelms and discombobulates him) but because he has the
dubious honor of being Nigeria’s most disastrous leader since independence.
There is no doubt that being Nigeria’s president is way above Jonathan’s pay
grade.

As someone who has followed America’s politics
closely in the last few years, I see uncannily analogous parallels between the
ongoing contrived hoopla over Buhari’s school certificate and the manufactured
hysteria by the lunatic fringe of American conservatives over Obama’s birth
certificate.

The conspiracy theorists who believe that Obama was not born in
America and is therefore ineligible to be America’s president are derisively
called “birthers,” and their movement is called “birtherism.” I think we should
also call the whacky conspiracy theorists who believe Buhari isn’t eligible to
be president of Nigeria because he supposedly has no West African School
Certificate (WASC) “WASCers,” and their movement “WASCerism.”

So what are the similarities between “birthers” and
“WASCers” and between “birtherism” and “WASCerism”? Let’s see.

When Obama’s previously lackluster campaign for the
White House gained unprecedented momentum and the prospects of his triumph
became an almost inexorable certainty, his opponents hatched a devious plot to
call to question his American citizenship and, thus, his suitability to run for
the office of America’s president. It started as hushed whispers on the margins
of the American society. Then it quickly spread to polite society, and soon
became the grist to the mill of the American news media. A cottage industry of
conspiracy theories about Obama’s putative Kenyan birth mushroomed in no time.

Obama’s campaign team initially ignored what they
thought was a preposterous, scorn-worthy distraction. They thought the
self-evident mendacity of the accusation that Obama was born in Kenya was
sufficient defense for Obama. For instance, when Obama was born, at least three
Hawaiian newspapers published notices of his birth. Microfilms of the notices
were published on the Internet by the newspapers. Plus, it’s simply implausible
that a teenage mother would leave the comfort of America and travel to Kenya,
which she had never been to, to give birth to her child and then return to
America after the birth.

When the whispering campaigns didn’t go away, Obama
decided to confront them frontally. On June 12, 2008, his campaign team created
a website called “Fight the Smears.” On the website Obama uploaded a scanned
copy of his "Certificate of Live Birth," also called the short form
birth certificate, which showed that he was born in Hawaii. The conspiracy
theorists were not persuaded. They said the birth certificate was fake, was
digitally altered to mask its forgery, and that it lacked the official stamp of
the state of Hawaii.

They said
they wanted Obama’s original, “long form birth certificate.” In 2011 Obama
requested that authorities in Hawaii release his original birth certificate,
which was uploaded onto the White House website. But it didn’t placate the
conspiracy theorists. They still said it was a forgery.

Do you find any parallels here between American
birthers and Nigerian WASCers? In the past couple of election cycles that
Buhari has run for president, no one has called his educational qualification
into question. He wasn’t a real threat. The social, cultural, and political basis
of his popularity derived from narrow primordial confines.He was chiefly popular among the people of the
extreme north, whose votes are not sufficient to win him a national election,
the cocksure confidence of his fanatical supporters notwithstanding. But this
election cycle is different. Buhari is riding on the crest of the fierce wave
of popular discontent against Jonathan’s rank incompetence.

About the only places Buhari isn’t wildly popular
are the southeast and the deep south whose combined electoral strength isn’t
sufficient to deny him a victory. So there is nakedly transparent panic in Aso
Rock. What to do? Well, enlist the news media—and the social media— to, like
Obama “birthers,” manufacture a phony controversy over his eligibility to run
for president. Put him on the defensive. Say he has no school certificate. Keep
saying it until you cause him to defend himself. When he does defend himself,
pick holes in his defense, however illogical and puerile this may be. Ask for
proof of his graduation from a secondary school. When he provides the proof,
impeach the credibility of the proof. Say it’s a forgery.

This strategy is intended to achieve two results.
One, it would slow Buhari’s ferociously rising momentum. He is expected to be
bogged down with trying to refute the layers of malicious falsehoods they will
continue to throw at him. Second, by keeping the issue in the news cycle up
until election day, seeds of doubt about Buhari’s education, eligibility, and
integrity may grow into rejection of his candidacy, especially among the
undecided.

But, like birthers in America, I doubt that Nigerian
WASCers can derail the unrelenting march of Buhari’s momentum. I only hope that
the Buhari campaign team doesn’t allow Jonathan’s spin doctors to continue to
define the main conversations of this election season. There are more pressing
issues we should be talking about than the “O” level certificates of
presidential candidates.

It’s frankly silly to obsess about the “O” level
school certificate of a man who not only rose to the pinnacle of his military
career but became the head of state of his country. In all this, though, it is
the Nigerian military’s public statement on this issue that bothers me deeply.
When a national military that can’t defeat a gang of domestic terrorists gets
embroiled in dirty politicking, you know you’re in really perilous times.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.